The master hard drive (c) crashed on Sunday losing the hidden operating system files. The slave drive (d) was fine. The files on c were all renamed and could not be repaired. I finally formatted c and reinstalled Windows 98. It is working fine. Now I get the following when I try to access drive D:

At the DOS prompts, I can switch to the d drive but if I do a dir of D I get the following message: "Invalid media type reading drive d: Abort, Retry, Fail"

In Windows 98, when I try to access d, I get the following message: "D:\ is not accessible. A device attached to the system is not functioning."

Prior to installing Windows 98, I could access dirve d.

It is interesting to note the c drive has crashed twice with in the last year both in the month of May (2001 & 2002) and on approximately the same day! I use Norton for virus scanning and firewall.

Thanks for the help.

If you know about connecting/deconnecting hard drives, try connecting only that secondary disk and boot with a system diskette. If you can access the drive, then your primary disk is failing and interferring.

Andrés

Crashed? what do you mean by crashed? It may be helpful in determining the nature of the problem. If a hard drive actually crashes then it never works again.
you may have a virus that encrypts the data on your hard drives and then triggers at a set date. This would explain the inaccessibility of the D: drive.
When you say renamed do you mean using scandisk? file001.chk, etc. If you do then you have either a virus, a faulty D: drive, or an unstoppable urge to fiddle with boot sector editing software.
Because the same problem could cause both the failure of the C: drive and the problem you describe with the D: drive it may well be a virus.
Are the C: and D: drives two seperate physical drives? (I.E not a single drive partitioned to look like 2) If they are then its a virus and you need to find out which one it is, although by now its probably too late as its already done its work with your D: drive. Find out if there is any recovery system available for that virus.
If C: and D: are the same physical drive then throw it out because its broken. Dont tempt fate by using a dodgy hard drive, if it has even 1 bad sector throw it out or sell it.
It would be interesting to know what size the drives are, what make they are, what system you were using before the crash, what you were doing leading up to the crash, wether there were bad sectors or not, and what kind of stuff you download.
Or maybe the drive is misconfigured, go into the BIOS and set all except primary master to "not present" to allow win98 IDE drivers to configure the drive.
Virus checkers need updating. A hundred new viruses and variants appear every day and if you're using a checker more than a year old you might as well not be using one at all.